Peter Orner Quotes
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I think what I'm after, a lot of the time, is just honesty. What accounts for the fact that the stories we tell ourselves - the story we carry around and think of most often - are the dark ones? Maybe we have to wander around in the darkness to understand it?
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There's a great Anton Chekhov quote. He says, "The Russian loves recalling life, but he does not love living." That scene has always been something that I have held dear. When something happens, the first thing you want to do is tell it. That's almost more exciting. It's almost simultaneous with the experience; you are already telling something incredible while it's happening. The stories that everybody carries around and repeats, I am really interested in that.
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My first book came out again - the re-issue from 2001. I was rereading it to make sure that I didn't miss any mistakes, and I didn't know who had written some of these stories. I really didn't. I am a different person now. It's weird. I think if stories are good, they have to have a life of their own that's independent of the writer. I like to think of my characters out there in other peoples' heads. That's a nice thing to think about.
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Maybe my work is somewhat divided into family stories, things I know intimately, and then everybody else in the world - the strangers who I am totally fascinated with.
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Rarely is the pain of losing someone expressed with such directness, energy, and, yes, humor. The grief in Evan Kuhlman'sWolf Boyis palpable, and so is the flawed, honest humanity of his characters. Here is real loss and somehow, real catharsis.
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Everybody, doesn't matter who you are, escapes time. And for me, nothing is stranger than the thought that kids are just kids. Nobody is just anything. Whether you are eight or eighty, you've got your own unique take on how weird this world is.
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I've spent so many years living in one place and imaging another.
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My characters tend to be people who are looking back on a life lived, their joys, their regrets.
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If a novel or a story works, you don't stop thinking about it; it doesn't truly end.
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I usually have a location and then I put the character there. I love place names. I think I'm tricking myself by being so specific - it suddenly becomes real to me. Just because I say it's Chicago, Illinois doesn't mean it's true, but place names sort of make me grounded and then I can put some people there.
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People have to follow their own strangeness. The minute they start making their own vision of the world flattened out so everyone can read it, they lose. I encourage people to be as awkward and odd on the page to capture their own way of seeing the world and not trying to see the world for other people.
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Actually, you’re not famous at all. Maybe you’ll get some traction after you’re dead?
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A collection, for me, is a book of very diverse stories that somehow speak to each other, across wide geography, across time, years, decades.
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A novel is like a long relationship and a short story is a brief one that lingers - it lingers powerfully and maybe more powerfully. I think that's true in a lot of cases, most long-term relationships compared to some of the briefer ones - the intensity of those brief ones that end, I think a short story is kind of like that. There's a certain level of intensity that I think is different.
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I think that maybe happy families don't need stories the way unhappy families need stories. Maybe they're too busy living that they don't actually step back and talk about life like the Anton Chekhov quote. I prefer Anton Chekhov to Lev Tolstoy, and the reason is because of what he leaves out. Sometimes I think Tolstoy had a theory that he was proving and he proved it. Chekhov is more ambiguous.
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I have a friend who teaches yoga (or is it pilates?), and she said that I don't seem to live in the moment. And I said, "Exactly!" I'd go nuts if I lived in the moment.
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I'm pretty tight - I rewrite, in some cases, 70 to 80 times before I show it to people.
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To me, and I'm sure for other writers, too, characters come back and they relive again, but what about those characters who only live for a page or two? Or for five pages or 10 pages. I like to think they're still out there - still living - but for me they kind of die, too. It's kind of sad. I don't think about them anymore unless I give them life again.
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We don't want emotion handed to us - that's not emotion. You have to build and come from the reader's soul.
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But this is exactly why I read--and don't belong to a book group--because reading is the most individual thing there is. Why collectivize it? Didn't we have enough bad English teachers in school? Crowd sourcing and literature shouldn't mix.
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I've spent a lot of time in prisons, first doing legal work and later, teaching.
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I think anything we do - eating, walking down the street, online shopping - gives you another perspective on writing stories.
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Alexis Coe rescues a buried but extraordinarily telling episode from the 1890s that resonates in all sorts of ways with today. That in itself would be an accomplishment. But this is a book that is truly riveting, a narrative that gallops. Lizzy Borden eat your heart out. Here’s a real crime of passion. Or was it? I dare you to pick this one up and try, just try to put it down.
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I write by hand in my notebooks and number the drafts, so I know how crazy I can get with this. Some writers, like my teacher Marilynne Robinson, she only writes one draft. I've thought about this a lot; I think it's because she writes it 80 times in her head before it comes out.
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What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways.
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John Colman Wood's The Names of Things is a thoughtful, patient, and ultimately rewarding book. It's about, among many other things, the connections human beings make, that in spite of everything, we will always make. To quote from the book, 'What he saw in the people was what the old anthropologists called communitas. It wasn't that the people sang and moved. It was their singing and moving together' Singing and moving together, Wood has found a way to express this profound and beautiful idea through fiction.
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I think some writers should wait for something to say.
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I beat a story to within an inch of its life - that's when I know its done. Not before, not after.
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I agree with the Lev Tolstoy quote completely, but I also feel like there's more to it. What is a happy family and an unhappy family? We're probably both of those things at the same time.
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I agonize over things like this - the order of things, section titles, all this architectural sort of stuff. Takes me years to figure out.
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